Reversing a 2012 decision of the Tel Aviv District Court, the Supreme Court on
Monday canceled all future Holocaust-related compensation, of NIS 50,000 per
person, for 219 elderly persons from the “Children of Tehran” Holocaust survivor
group.

However, per a November 2013 consensual agreement by the state,
those persons from the group who already started receiving funds do not need to
return them.

The name “Children of Tehran” was given to a group of over
1,000 Holocaust survivors making up Jews who left Poland for Russia in 1939,
prior to the Nazi invasion, as well as children of those families who were
placed in Christian Polish orphanages.

Some of the children eventually
journeyed with a Polish-Jewish militia called the “Anders Army” through many
locations until they reached Tehran – where they lived for some years, in harsh
conditions.

In 1943, when the Jewish Agency learned about the children,
most of them were brought to then British Mandate Palestine.

For various
reasons, the Children of Tehran as a group were not recognized as Holocaust
survivors, for the purposes of receiving special compensation, until
1997.

In 2004, they filed a lawsuit to receive compensation. On August
12, 2012 they received a judgment from the Tel Aviv District Court for each
person to receive NIS 50,000, with a harsh rebuke to the state for abandoning
them.

The central question of the ruling was whether a 1952 agreement
between Israel and Germany created a collective right to compensation for
Holocaust survivors living in Israel or an individual right to compensation for
each victim.

The Supreme Court, with Justice Elyakim Rubinstein writing
the opinion for a panel of justices that also included Edna Arbel and Deputy
President Miriam Naor, held that the right was collective and not
individual.

Rubinstein said that the purpose of the agreement, however
imperfect, was to help build the State of Israel.

Accordingly, he said,
that some funds were given to individual Holocaust survivors as a class of
persons to help them build lives and through helping them, help the
state.

Other funds, Rubinstein noted, were invested in state
infrastructure and were not given to individuals at all.

Even an expert
who was testifying on behalf of the Children of Tehran admitted that he was not
really arguing that the original 1952 agreement obligated paying each individual
survivor.

Rather, he was arguing that despite the state’s limitations in
the 1950s, when it needed the money for general purposes to survive as a
collective, the agreement should be reinterpreted in light of Israel’s current
more economically stable position, where the state can afford to compensate each
individual.

All three justices expressed intense moral and philosophical
sympathy for the survivors, saying that they “should not need to knock on the
door of the courts” to obtain the ability to live above poverty, and in
dignity.

The justices detailed a history of state lapses in taking care
of its graying Holocaust survivor group, emphasizing a 2007 State Comptroller
report and other information indicating the state’s apathy toward many
survivors’ poverty.

They implied that even if the state had no legal
obligation under the 1952 agreement to take care of the Children of Tehran, the
state should still find ways to help.